15 Pilgrimage, traveling gurus and transnational networks The lay meditation movement in contemporary Chinese societies Ngar-sze Lau Introduction ‘Sufi orders, Catholic missionaries, and Buddhist monks carried word and praxis across vast spaces before those places became nation states or even states’ (Rudolph 1997, p. 1). In the context of global religions, sacred landscapes, pilgrimage, migration and diaspora, missionary activities, and transnational religions network have become important themes of study. The ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences has had an impact on the study of space, place and location in religious studies (Knott 2010, p. 476). Scholars have paid attention to religion and migration since the early 1990s. Kivisto (2014) has discussed how religion might function to allow for social adaptation among new immigrants. For instance, the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid in the East End of London has been home to distinct religions since the eighteenth century among immigrant groups: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. From the case study of Chinese converting to Christianity in Iowa City, Chinese churches became new homes providing social support to those new immigrants and students from mainland China. Migration and the growth of diaspora communities around the world are instrumental in building transnational religious networks. Transnationalism is a process that immigrants tend to sustain in their social relations to link societies of origin and settlement. These relationships cut across geographic, cultural and political borders (Basch, Schiller and Blanc 1994). In the case of Cuban-Americans building a shrine Our Lady of Charity in Miami, Tweed (1997) shows how religions ‘dwell and cross’ to create spaces among migrants who cultivate rituals and myths and foster imaginations of the homeland. Asian Buddhists who migrated to the United States, Canada and Brazil have built Buddhist temples to preserve their traditional faith to maintain their ethnic and cultural identity (Kawanami 2012). Transnational migrants recreate a new form of global religions with new geographical spaces to make their local identities more meaningful and stronger than their political identities (Levitt and Schiller 2004). 187